Alex Ross Perry (director). Pavements. 2025.
STEPHEN PICCARELLA: Do you think it’s possible to make an honest movie about a band like Pavement, and if so, how?
MARK IBOLD: Of course it’s possible. How would it be possible? I’m not a filmmaker, so I don’t know what the best way . . . you know, what to recommend.
In 2022, reports started rolling in one after another of improbable but fascinating tributes to my favorite band, Pavement. In coordination with a four-night stop on their reunion tour, a gallery in lower Manhattan opened “Pavements: 1933–2022,” an exhibition devoted to the ’90s alternative rock icons. A couple months later, the nearby Sheen Center debuted Slanted! Enchanted!, a jukebox musical adapting dozens of the band’s songs. Still later a cinema in Prospect Park screened an exclusive cut of a Pavement biopic called Range Life. In the time between these events, fans and the media slowly gathered that all of them had been staged by director Alex Ross Perry as part of Pavements, a movie about the band—not a biopic, but an erratic pastiche of the many genres of movies that rock bands have historically inspired: mockumentary, concert film, rock opera, and more. The following is an attempt to make sense of my own fascination with all these efforts, by means at least as improbable, if not dubious, as the film itself.
THE MOVIE ADAPTATION OF THE SEQUEL TO YOUR LIFE: PAVEMENT ON THE BIG SCREEN
NEW YORK, NY: Pavement, the world’s most important and influential band––Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, National Recording Registry, and Library of Congress inductees; MTV lifetime achievement honorees; RIAA Gold-certified artists; multiple-time Grammy winners; and of course recent jukebox musical, museum exhibition, and Hollywood biopic subjects––now have yet another accomplishment to add to their already legendary Wikipedia page. The band is the focus of one of the most comprehensive and inventive music films ever made: Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, in theaters May 2025.
The world premiere of the film came last fall at the end of Pavement’s marathon world reunion tour, which began in 2022, roughly coinciding with the thirtieth anniversary of their first album. In many ways, the 2020s as a decade have solidified around a broad international effort to commemorate and document for posterity the culmination of the band’s legacy. Related efforts include a viral TikTok dance, a shoutout in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and a handful of endorsements and collaborations with name brands including Apple, Absolut Vodka, and New York City’s Veselka. In 2024, the world is banding together to rally around Pavement.
It’s only natural that the literary media would join in on this celebration of a band that has given so much to the culture and the arts it exists to facilitate and support. The question is: how?
SP: I think we’re both gin actually . . . oh I’m vodka, sorry.
SERVER: I was like not you gaslighting me in plain daylight, goodness.
N+1 EDITOR: [Laughs] Thank you.
SP: Cheers.
N1E: Cheers.
SP: That is smooth.
N1E: It’s a great bar.
In search of an overarching theory of what it means to be a Pavement fan, I, your rock scribe extraordinaire, went to the New York premieres of both Pavements and Louder Than You Think, a documentary about original Pavement drummer Gary Young. I spoke to Pavements director Alex Ross Perry, Pavements choreographer Angela Trimbur, and Pavement bassist Mark Ibold. I also looked back through my personal history with the band and collection of Pavement memorabilia and lore, read a bunch of the books Stephen Malkmus claims to have read, alienated several publicists, and listened to many hours of music I have been listening to since before I hit puberty.
At the center of all this high-class razzle-dazzle was Perry, the creative force behind these multi-genre Pavement happenings. He was a movie director with a background in musical theater as well as connections to the art world. I knew if I was going to be able to tell the story I needed to tell about Pavement, I would have to get to him.
I am not a film or music journalist by trade. I periodically publish cultural criticism, mostly about books, and occasional fiction and essays. I started writing this piece as a fan of the band and the filmmaker involved, and as an appreciator of elaborate hoaxes and multimedia experiments. For those same reasons, I wanted my own Pavements “review” to be different, freely shifting between fiction and reality and constantly at play with all traditional or popular written forms. Fortunately for me, everyone I approached about participating in the writing process, from my editor to Perry himself, seemed as intrigued by this premise as I was. Many of the interview questions and answers that appear in the piece are ironic or performed, but none of them are invented.
SP: Musical Theater can be understood as a contemporary interpretation of opera, which Richard Wagner termed gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.” How does Slanted! Enchanted! exemplify the Wagnerian concept of the gesamtkunstwerk?
ALEX ROSS PERRY: Entirely, I assume. The process of making this show was a full immersion in Pavement, not as five guys who put out five albums, but in Pavement as a collection of words and sounds. The musical does the one thing that most people would consider impossible—it removes the character of “Stephen Malkmus” from Pavement’s songs. The songs now stand alone, reinterpreted and given to a dozen performers, rather than one messianic figure.
The thing about these lyrics, and the narratives I found within them, is that a considerable amount of Pavement songs are about being in a band, playing music, thinking about what it means for yourself to be up there as the singer. Malkmus would likely say these are not biographical reflections of where he was in his life at the time of writing them, but then again, I’d never ask.
But because of this, they all lend themselves quite nicely to narrative extraction, and the musical becomes Pavement (the music) without Pavement (the people). This too is a German concept.
N1E: The Pavement of it all really gives you a lot of license, I think, to be, like, a little shaggy, or kind of messy, you know? If it was a tighter band I think the strictures would be a little more, you know . . . you’d be more constrained.
SP: That was one thing Alex Ross Perry kept saying, was that like, you know, a Pavement album will have a punk song, and then a country song, and then a sixties jangle-pop song, but they’re all like––none of them is a fully realized version of any given form, and so the movie did the same thing.
N1E: Yeah, yeah, there’s always a little trailing off or like . . .
SP: Yeah, so this would be like that.
Anyone who listens to Pavement can recognize their sound: loops of snazzy but off-the-cuff fretwork alongside jagged squalls of skronk and fuzz, bratty, yawping hardcore alongside anthemic beach-bum bangers. What’s not as well established is Pavement’s formidable cache outside the music business. In the late ’90s, at the climax of Pavement’s tenure as reigning paragons of popular music in America and the rest of the world, Stephen Malkmus was part of a New York coterie formed around the literary magazine Open City. The magazine’s founder, Robert Bingham, a young newspaper heir whose fiction was already winning comparisons to heroes like Robert Stone and Richard Yates, had become a close friend. After the band broke up, co-founder Spiral Stairs accepted a position as a professor of urban planning at the prestigious Preston School of Industry. Malkmus’s proximity to Bingham and Stairs and the high-society circles they represented inspired further aspirations in a young rock musician who was growing tired of his first successful project and the life he’d built around it.
SP: I mean like when you see it you’ll be delighted, I’m sure, but yeah, the idea I had originally had for the piece, which I told you about, was like, you know, they created this fake universe of Pavement ephemera that presented them like they were the most important band of all time, so I was thinking about writing, like, a reported alt-weekly-style feature from within that world, treating that stuff like it’s all true, like Steve Jobs was in fact a big fan of theirs and whatever, and hired them to do an ad, and then the more I saw the different things Perry was doing, and then finally seeing the thing, I was like, actually, the right way to do it would be to do what the movie does, which is like, what is every kind of piece you could write about a band or a movie? Like a celebrity profile, a piece of academic criticism, a self-indulgent personal essay, some kind of fan fiction . . .
N1E: Uh huh, yeah yeah yeah, and then attempt simultaneously . . .
SP: And then write them all and do some kind of like, pastiche of them.
SP: Which pieces in “Pavements: 1933–2022” do you believe worthy of exhibition in a major art-world institution like the Whitney Museum of American Art, and why? How do these pieces visibly announce the influence of the time Malkmus, West, and Berman spent at the Whitney?
ARP: The Malkmus Notebooks are of course the most invaluable single object we had access to. They could sit comfortably in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They reached out to him, but the plan was already to display them—and everything else—in the permanent museum being built for [the Pavement collection] in Stockton, which is still undergoing fundraising to meet its substantial budget. I’ve seen concept art and bids for the space and have no doubt it will be a world-class musical institution with ephemera, a focus on education, and entire wings devoted to things we simply didn’t have room for, such as additional David Berman context.
The Whitney’s influence on them was obvious, once we heard them explain it. Pavement were—and still are—a postmodern band. Post-punk influences, a synthesis and awareness of all that came before them, followed by a knowing deconstruction of the same. This is part and parcel with much 20th-century postmodern art, which Pavement embody in their own sonic way.
The Singer, The Witch, and the Spiral Staircase
Many years ago, in the recently settled New World, there lived a young man named Stephen of the clan of Malchus. Young Stephen was known far and wide for singing gentle, pleasing songs and accompanying them by playing softly upon his lute. His townfolk called him their Singer, and his daily concerts were attended by many.
One day a woman of the clan of Chesley called the local Doctor to her home to see after her ailing husband. When the Doctor arrived, he examined the man, and was stunned to find no apparent physical cause of his unwellness. He told the woman that she might ask for the services of a Priest, to see whether her husband’s ailment might be one of the spirit rather than of the body.
The Priest arrived in due time, and talked to Mister Chesley for a good part of the afternoon. By twilight he was satisfied that he saw no reason for Mister Chesley to have brought such an ailment upon himself as a visitation of God’s wrath. Distraught, Missus Chesley threw herself about her husband’s prone body. O, my dear! she cried. What will we do now?
Finally, Missus Chesley went to the far edge of the township to see a woman named Loretta, a woman who was rumoured among the townfolk to be a practising Witch.
The Phonetic Modalities of Singer Stephen Malkmus
“Depending on the arch of your tongue, like what part of your tongue is arching and how close it is to the front of your mouth or the back of your mouth, that’s how we get different sounds. I mean, your lips really does have something to do with it, and the amount that you open your jaw, but that’s . . . it’s really about your tongue more than anything else. Softer. Shorter. Lower.”
—Joe Keery’s vocal coach in Pavements
As part of his preparation for the role of Stephen Malkmus in Alex Ross Perry’s film Range Life, actor Joe Keery studied with a vocal coach to help him identify and reproduce the particularities of Malkmus’s voice and diction. Descriptors of certain traits became like mantras for Keery: Softer, Shorter, Lower. Other characteristics emerged as definitive. Malkmus rarely rounds his lips, which contributes to his flatness of affect. He expels more air through his nose than his mouth, resulting in a hypernasal tone. He frequently depresses his soft palate, inducing vocal fry. These features, observed in a person so voluminously expressive in public, offer unique theoretical implications for several areas of linguistic and literary study.
SP: How do you see Slanted! Enchanted! fitting into the pantheon of great musicals of the past, like The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Company, etc.?
ANGELA TRIMBUR: The very most important musical of all time. Tops ’em all. TONY let’s go see you soon.
N1E: Right so it’s like, I actually—when you just said Steve Jobs was a fan, I couldn’t even tell if that was true.
SP: So, in the museum there was a fake Apple ad with Malkmus on it, and a little plaque that was like, “Steve Jobs commissioned Stephen Malkmus as part of this series because of his fandom of the band,” which is not true, yeah.
N1E: Right right right . . . but it’s . . .
SP: But it’s almost . . . it’s like, plausible.
N1E: It’s true enough, right, right, like Malkmus-like people did do things like that.
Malkmus eventually approached Nastanovich (whose father, Robert Nastanovich Sr., had served as Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liaison for the Jimmy Carter White House) about a potential role in politics. The Obama Administration was happy to play ball with a figure of Malkmus’s stature. In 2011, Malkmus moved his family to Berlin to serve as an American cultural attaché to Germany. However, two years later, when the Edward Snowden global surveillance disclosures revealed that the US had been secretly surveilling German citizens (and even tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone lines), Malkmus realized he had been installed as a puppet by a government with an insidious agenda. Malkmus moved his family back to Portland the following year, where he explored this experience on the album “Wig Out at Jagbags,” particularly in “The Janitor Revealed,” an acid protest song about an innocent patriot conned into illicit espionage.
In a 1958 paper called “Linguistics and Poetics,” structural linguist Roman Jakobson identifies what he calls the “emotive” or “expressive” function of language, the mode by which a speaker “aims a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about.” As Jakobson explains, “A man, using expressive features to indicate his angry or ironic attitude, conveys ostensible information.” The difference between simply uttering the word “big” and “the emphatic prolongation of the vowel,” he continues, “is a conventional, coded linguistic feature.” Prolongation of syllables is one of a number of features Jakobson identifies as unique to the emotive or expressive mode which communicate information distinct from the words they are used to articulate.
The speech of a singer like Malkmus, governed by the mantrae “Softer,” “Shorter,” and “Lower,” is observable as restrictive of the emotive or expressive mode. Every mechanism of the speech apparatus is somehow restrained. The soft palate is depressed, air flow is redirected from the mouth, the lips do not move. What is the function of such restraint, either evolutionary or psychological? If Jakobson’s analysis of this mode of speech is correct, Malkmus exhibits an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to withhold “ostensible information” and to conceal his “attitude.” Such withholding might suggest an almost overprotective instinct, an unusual unwillingness to surrender anything that might yield insight into an internal world in which one might encounter any identifying idiosyncrasies.
SP: So, you saw this movie. After having seen and participated in it, what’s your feeling about that? Like, is it possible to make a good movie about a rock band? And if so, did this movie succeed? And if so, how?
Mark Ibold: I think for sure it’s possible, and I think it shows that—there will be lots of other really good movies about rock bands, because I think that this film shows that you can approach it in many different ways, and you don’t have to do it in the standard way that films have been done. But subject matter has a lot to do with what makes a film good, you know? So it would help if it was about a band that was as interesting as Pavement.
The Witch pressed her hands to Mister Chesley’s breast and uttered a series of incantations in a tongue unknown to Mister and Missus Chesley. Then she drew back as if from an open flame and declared that Mister Chesley was being haunted by the banshee. If Mister Chesley was to be restored to health, the Witch explained, Mister and Missus Chesley would have to drive the banshee from their home.
Only someone with the gift of music would be able to quiet the caterwauling and clattering of the banshee, she continued. If Stephen the Singer were able to learn the songs of the faeries in the wood and play them at the Chesleys’ bedside as they slept, the banshee would pass on from their home to the site of her next haunting.
I will never be able to say for sure, but I’m pretty sure I heard Pavement for the first time in the car with my dad and brother sometime in the mid-’90s, when I was a child in early grade school. I know that when I actually sat down to listen to Slanted and Enchanted several years later, the chorus to “Trigger Cut” sounded familiar in a hypnagogic way that made me feel instantly connected to and moved by it. Most of the other songs on the album were still too bent and arcane for me to appreciate then, but that was exciting in itself, a challenge to raise myself up to meet this unfamiliar brand of cool. This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Various forms of self-fashioning followed, and soon I became myself, a guy named Stephen who smirks and scoffs and dodges questions compulsively, who dresses preppy but never combs his hair.
N1E: Is it like anything you’ve seen before?
SP: That’s a good question. That’s a good question.
N1E: For some reason the thing I was thinking about as maybe like the opposite, but possibly a useful opposite, though I haven’t seen it, is that stupid as fuck movie where the Beatles didn’t exist, do you know what I’m talking about?
SP: Oh, Yesterday. I have seen that movie. It is not like that movie. That’s a very bad movie. But so there’s a fake Pavement biopic in it, which is intentionally very stupid, and that maybe sort of has that tone, but. . . . He talked a lot about that in the Q&A, like the obsolescence of a music doc or biopic as a form was something that he was playing with, so there’s kind of like several failed attempts to do the right thing within the movie. This is maybe highfalutin, but it felt to me like what I imagine Chelsea Girls would have felt like live, you know what I mean?
After spending the morning afoot, Stephen had still seen neither hide nor hair of any faery or faery-like creature. He sat atop the bark of a fallen log and began to play aloud a song of his own composition. Three men in military garb emerged from the trees and approached. Hark!, called the man nearest the front. Who comes upon us singing here?
I’m Stephen. Who are you?
We are citizen soldiers Ibold, Nastanovich, and West, presently engaged in the War Between the States.
The man furthest behind, who stooped low with a drunken posture, shouted out, Two states! We want two states!
The soldier named Ibold frowned. What brings you now to the wood?
I’m supposed to find the faeries.
The faeries ne’er descend so low to the ground. To get near them, you’ll have to climb the Spiral Staircase. Ibold pointed into the distance behind him, where a great stone structure could just be seen between the farthest trees.
ARP: I think most people associate the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal with Brighten the Corners and, by the time it ended, Terror Twilight as well. You can say not much happened in the decade that Pavement were putting out records, but how many times have you seen footage of the Rodney King Riots or the OJ Bronco chase soundtracked to Pavement? Too many to count.
When my older half-brother David turned 13, he started smoking. The next year he started smoking pot. Then came other drugs, cutting school, cutting himself, and, perhaps most importantly, devoted fandom of metal in all its most extreme forms. When I was still prepubescent I started spending hours in his room pretending to enjoy music that terrified me: power metal, speed metal, melodic death, blackened death, and, scariest of all, Norwegian black metal, the DIY subgenre that emerged in the nineties around a coterie of young nihilist bigots who soon became famous for burning churches and murdering each other. I assumed at the time that my brother associated this music, as the media usually did, with a self-destructive lifestyle that openly celebrated violence, but I still wanted to be close to it, because I wanted to be close to him.
When my brother’s problems with drugs and school got bad enough that he faced expulsion or worse, my father and his mother sent him away to a boarding school. He got kicked out, and eventually his parents had no options left but military school and a wilderness rehabilitation program where he would climb and camp in the mountains of Vermont in the dead of winter until he learned enough self-preservation skills to satisfy them. They chose the latter. This was the beginning of the rest of my brother’s life, but for me, at age eleven, it was the end of my life with him. As I understood it, it was the end of my having an older brother.
Malkmus’s speech, restricted as it is from betraying any emotive or informative intent, possesses an illocutionary force. It is the speech-into-law of a leader, a king. The given name Stephen is derived from the Greek verb stéphein meaning “to wreathe” or “to crown,” and Pavement’s oft-cited status as “the world’s most important and influential band” is revelatory given this context. The band’s music, all five players accompanying the voice of its singer, enacts the linguistic dictation of a hegemon. The band itself signifies hegemony in myriad ways: its timekeeper is Steve West, another “crowned” officer whose name also bears the resonance of West as frontier, West as center of world power, West as setting and subject of modern myth.
Dear n+1 Editors,
I guess I have to hand it to you. You found an even more odious way than a movie, a museum, or a musical to canonize a band that was always second-string as far as alt-rock goes. Don’t get me wrong, I was as much a fan as I was a friend, but if we’re looking strictly at the stats here, these guys were never starting players. However many miles of style he claimed to have, Steve was never the Byronic hero that Scott Weiland or even Billy Corgan was. In fact—and this is on the books—he wound up a frontman the same way he did everything else: by default.
One conceit ofPavements is that Pavement is “the world’s most important and influential band.” This is not, strictly, true, but depending on your relationship to the band, it might seem more true than not. Perry explained to me that the movie is meant to exist in the imagination of Pavement’s biggest fan; my experience of watching and writing about it has made this notion feel prophetic, as if my life is imitating his art imitating what goes on in my mind. I don’t believe Pavement to be the world’s most important and influential band any more than I believe rock bands to be influential or important at all beyond their ability to move and inspire listeners and make a certain amount of money. I do, however, believe that stories that proceed from absurd premises can often arrive at truths that more straightforward or outwardly faithful narratives may miss. My hope in writing about Pavement was always to start from a fairly remote place and eventually land somewhere familiar and comfortable.
The Spiral Staircase wound and wound into the clouds and above, and by the time Stephen had reached the top, not only could he no longer see the trees of the wood, he could no longer see even the ground below him. All he saw was sky extending in every direction. Soon, howe’er, lights appeared in the distance, lights that slowly grew as they came toward him.
Around the time my brother got sent away, I began writing poetry and prose of various kinds, a practice I would continue for years before I professionalized it in any small way. A preoccupation of this writing, and a focal point of multiple longform projects, has been a relationship between two brothers, or men with a familial bond, which is eventually severed by an untimely death. The names Stephen and David appear often. The balance of personalities between one who is ultimately emotionally grounded and one who is always living on the brink of annihilation is also important. There is also almost always some reference to metal music and culture.
As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Stephen Malkmus became friends with David Berman, a Virginian by way of Texas who was obsessed with gothic rock and experimented heavily with various drugs. The two would eventually form the Silver Jews, a Pavement-adjacent project (but not, as Berman was always quick to clarify, a Pavement side-project) that would anchor a mercurial but enduring friendship between two men with complementary but opposed natures—one a protestant west coast boulevardier with an eternally winning outlook, the other an inspired and depressive southern Jew. On their celebrated album American Water, the two sing almost every song word by word in unison, their two distinct voices gradually becoming one integrated whole.
SP: It feels frivolous to the point of parody to pay this much attention to something like this, and yet it does—I do have the earnest impulse to do it, so I think wrestling with that is probably for me, like, the subject of the piece. Does that make sense?
N1E: Right, like how much—how many layers of attention does one band deserve?
Dear n+1 editors,
Sorry, just to insure me against the more litigiously readerly types: I don’t for a second think I or my own work any more worthy of this kind of attention. I spent my fathering years tending to the hedges of a maze with no center, a monastic existence distinguished now only by its ephemerality. The few accounts of it I left behind, a handful of free-bin country records and a slim-to-none volume of dive-bar postmodern poems, are pretty weak candidates for any accredited hall of fame or national registry. I’m bringing this up because your magazine has a legacy of its own to think about, and unlike me, you’ve still got time to make of it what it ought to be.
I will give your hatchet man Piccarella some credit. He’s a raw talent in the turn-of-phrase department. If I were a scout at one of the big state schools looking to fill out my prose lineup for the fall, I’d be on the phone with him right now hawking scholarship money. That’s the thing about rookies, though; most of them don’t know they’ve gone pro until they’re already retired.
SP: Right, OK, that’s good. OK, so to make an honest movie about a rock band you have to make it about a band as interesting as Pavement.
MI: Well yeah, but what do you mean by honest? I mean, you don’t have to be like—a lot of people are honest.
SP: Well, I mean, that’s kind of the question of the movie. Like, how do you be honest about a rock band? In the movie there’s all these failed attempts to make an honest movie about a rock band, and so, like, what does it take to get to the—you know, the real shit?
MI:
In 2019, in the midst of preparation for his first tour in over a decade, David Berman hanged himself in an apartment in Park Slope. I had bought tickets for my girlfriend and I to see him in Philadelphia. Berman’s music was one of the last things we really shared toward the end of our relationship. I remember the impulse to denial I felt upon learning of his death, as well as the way it reminded me of the death by hanging of another of my favorite writers at the time, David Foster Wallace. Since then, almost everything I write, no matter how I plan my projects, features a man named Stephen, who buries a spiritual brother named David, who could not survive himself.
Dear n+1 editors,
Look, I don’t mean to come at you heavy here. Much of what I’ve come across on page or screen under the banner of this transport has been top-dollar. It’s only out of due respect that I raise these flags. There’s a whole dark world of jobbery and misrule your editorial efforts stand to resist, if you put the honest work in. So for your own sake: choose your words—and the subjects on which you train them—with some discrimination. Nostalgia doesn’t earn anyone anything but pride in a job not done. Quarantine the past? Forget it. Best you can do is try to keep it off your back. And since I failed when it mattered, let me warn you fairly: try with everything you’ve got.
—DCB
SP: What the movie does is, like, all of those things are ironic, but then the assemblage of them, or the disconnect between them—basically like, in the cracks you see the sincerity, you know? So it’s like, all of the failed attempts to be honest about why this band is important add up to an honest statement. That would be the idea.
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!